Sunday Dinner

For this task I was asked to photograph “Sunday dinner” and produce at least 5 colour images of this meal. For this task, as I do not tend to have a traditional roast as Sunday dinner very often, I instead photographed the main meal which I had on Sunday which was steak, chips and onion rings with a couple of slices of buttered bread on the side. For this task I photographed this meal from a few different angles in order to capture the best shots of this meal. Here are the photographs which I took during this shoot.

 This is the first photograph I took for this task and it shows a general shot of the food which I was photographing. This photograph shows each component of the meal including the steak, chips, onion rings, buttered bread and some rings on onion also. This photograph was taken within my kitchen right after the food had been put onto the plate so this means that the lighting for this photograph was provided by harsh and bright artificial lighting. This lighting is not ideal as it is far too harsh and does not make the food look appetising. A more yellow based light would improve this photograph as it would bring out the golden tones in the chips and onion rings more. When taking this photograph I used quite a shallow depth of field in order to make the food in the foreground such as the chips and the onion rings in focus and the food in the background such as the steak drop out of focus. Once I had taken this photograph, I put it into Photoshop and changed the levels slightly in order to try to bring the harshness of the lighting down a little however the lighting within this image is still a bit too harsh.

 This is another photograph which I took for this shoot and is a close up shot of the steak topped with a ring of onion. I chose to take this close up shot in order to show the piece of steak off on its own without being distracted away from it by other food items on the plate. When taking this photograph I used a shallow depth of field and focused on the far side of the ring of the onion and the side of the steak which is the furthest away from the camera. I did this as I thought it would be slightly different to focus on the background more than the foreground for a change as when taking photographs I usually focus on the foreground rather than the background. This photograph was taken at the same time as the last one meaning that this was also taken within my kitchen under bright, harsh artificial lighting which is not ideal for this photograph. After I had taken this photograph, I put it into Photoshop and altered the levels in order to try and tone down the harshness of the lighting a little.

 This is another photograph which I took for this shoot and is a close up shot of a slice of buttered read with a couple of rings of onion towards the right of the photograph. For this photograph, I used a shallow depth of field and focused on the middle of the shot meaning that the far side of the bread is in focus while the rest of the photograph such as the near side of the bread and the rings of onion have dropped out of focus. I like the effect this has had on the photograph as it means that the eye is only drawn to one part of the photograph and is not distracted by other items and it means that the photograph is not too busy. Once again, the location for this image is within my kitchen under harsh bright artificial lighting. This was the only lighting I had available to me at this time as it was dark outside at the time meaning there was no natural light available to use and I did not have access to any alternative artificial lighting so I had to make the best of what I had available. After I had taken this photograph, I put it into Photoshop and altered the levels slightly in order to try reduce the harshness of the lighting and to bring out the yellow colour of the butter.

 This is another photograph which I took for this shoot and is a close up shot of the rings of onion which topped my meal. With this photograph I wanted the onion to be the main focus but not the only thing featured within the photograph as I wanted to get the idea of a full meal across with this photograph. So to do this, I placed the onion on top of the steak and chips so the onion would be in the foreground with the steak and chips in the background of the image and I used a large aperture to create a shallow depth of field meaning that I could focus on only the onion allowing the steak and chips to drop out of focus slightly. This photograph, like the others was taken under harsh artificial lighting with my kitchen while I had no access to alternative lighting. I also put this photograph into Photoshop and attempted to bring the harshness of the lighting down a bit and to add more interest to the image by changing the levels slightly.

 This is the final photograph I took from this shoot and it is probably my favourite from this shoot although it is not perfect. This photograph shows a selection of onion rings piles on top of each other and using a shallow depth of field I focused on the onion ring which is located in the middle of the photograph as I felt that this was the most appealing onion ring to focus on. This photograph is my favourite from this shoot as I like the golden colour of the onion rings as I think it makes them look quite appetising. This photograph was taken within my kitchen under harsh bright artificial lighting which is not ideal for this photograph so once I had taken this photograph I put it into Photoshop and altered the levels in order to bring out the golden colour of the onion rings more and make them look more appealing.